Post-Marxism
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"To what extent has it become necessary to modify the notion of class struggle, in order to be able to deal with the new political subjects — women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements etc — of a clearly anti-capitalist character, but whose identity is not constructed around specific 'class interests'?"-- "Socialist Strategy: Where Next?" (1981) by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe |
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Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968.
The term post-Marxism first appeared in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theoretical work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. It can be said that post-Marxism as a political theory was developed at the University of Essex by Laclau and Mouffe. Philosophically, post-Marxism counters derivationism and essentialism (for example, it does not see economy as a foundation of politics and the state as an instrument that functions unambiguously and autonomously on behalf of the interests of a given class).
See also
- Arena
- Autonomism
- Budapest School (Lukács)
- Frankfurt School
- Marxism and Marxist philosophy
- Neo-Marxism
- Neo-Marxian economics
- New Left Review
- Open Marxism
- Poststructuralism
- Rethinking Marxism
- Specters of Marx